Origins of the AVI
Back in the mid 1960’s a British man called Brian Hall began an investigation into values. He had been working in Mexico where he had learned from the work of Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich and Eric Fromm all of which led him to an interest in language and how people come to see and judge the world in the way that they do.
Values emerged from Halls studies as clusters of energy inherent in language and over the course of twenty years he and his associates refined their work identifying and defining 125 values that appeared to be stable and evident across a wide range of samples and populations.
Next Hall collaborated with Benjamin Tonna, a sociologist working in Italy. Tonna was seeking a method to quantify what he termed “quality information” which he saw as information in which the values content is evident. Tonna found that the questions raised by the values, rather than the solutions, were of prime importance. Together with Hall he worked on articulating discernment questions that would enable an individual to prioritise values.
Between 1974 and 1980 Hall and Tonna led seminars and explored their values theories extensively across Europe and America and conducted preliminary testing of the Hall-Tonna Inventory of Values. In 1979 Hall began teaching at Santa Clara University and continued the development work there. In 1983 the Inventory was subject to a series of specific standardisation procedures and the 125 values were given standard definitions.
“A Values Inventory” or the AVI, is the product of a further collaboration, this time between Hall and Paul Chippendale of Minessence in Australia. In 1988 Chippendale, originally an engineer, worked with Hall to bring the Hall-Tonna Inventory to Australia and embarked upon the process of evolving the questioning and analysis for web-based operation to enable remote and self guided access to the tool rather than having to depend upon a facilitator or assessment centre arrangement.
Over the last twenty years three more values have emerged bringing the total inventory within the AVI to 128. More importantly researchers have found that values and their relationships to other areas of interest to individuals and organisations such as learning styles, stress management, organisational culture and world view types can now be consistently and meaningfully explored all through the technology behind the AVI.
Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire - Biography of Freire on Wikipedia
http://www.answers.com/topic/ivan-illich - Biography of Ivan Illich on Answers.com
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/fromm.html - Biographical information for Eric Fromm written by Professor George Boeree of Shippensburg University in America
http://www.minessence.net – home of Minessence Group and Minessence Foundation